Oh yeah addendum... because of different economies in different countries, companies will price games differently, IE based on how much that market is willing to spend on a game. If you could just import games from the cheapest place in the world you could be cheating people who worked hard on a game. If they end up not turning a profit on the game because of people who pirate or import they may not make a sequel. So support your favorite game developers! If you really don't think it's worth the price wait for it to go in the bargain bin.
Of course games that aren't even RELEASED in your region are a different matter.
PAL TVs use different aspect ratios and refresh rates from NTSC TVs. Games wouldn't play correctly (too slow or too fast, or glitchy/tearing graphics caused by incorrect refresh rates, and stretched or cropped graphics). Of course it's entirely possible for a game to be coded in such a way that it can correctly handle different refresh rates and aspect ratios, but I think older consoles were specifically limited to either NTSC or PAL modes in the hardware depending on region and you needed the appropriate mode games.
I am not an expert on this, but I'm willing to bet at least in the beginning that region unlocked TV-based games would have graphical problems when played on a "wrong region" TV.
I like how the Batman article complains about AA being force off, but then says "oh wait, it's not the same AA as what you can force on in driver settings, it's totally different". Sounds to me like it's not AA but something different, since it's done by the game engine instead of by DirectX. It's entirely possible the devs encountered problems using this AA engine on ATI hardware and so disabled it in order to ship in time.
Try setting the priority of MsMpEng to BelowNormal or Idle, this should keep it from eating all your CPU time.
You can also try disabling real time protection temporarily if something is going too slow thanks to the slower disk access and CPU.
I seem to recall having some framerate slowdown in online games while playing with the beta. I will have to try this new version though because of all the good reports. It shouldn't be too bad if I disable real time protection while I'm in-game... I'll do my own benchmarks to be sure.
I usually have to format either when a) I do something stupid and make my system unbootable or unusable, such as installing IE8 and then accidentally running a third-party tool which replaces some of those files with backups of IE7 files, totally screwing up IE and any program that has a dependency on it (Steam or any program that uses the ActiveX control, IIRC).
Or b) something happens that I just can't fix. For example, every so often when I drag and drop files in Explorer, explorer will freeze instead of performing the drop operation. I have no explanation. Disabling copy hooks and drag and drop shell extensions has not fixed the problem. If it becomes annoying enough I will reinstall.
Incidentally tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of the last time I installed XP. Usually it's more like 6 months.
Oh yeah and I wouldn't exactly say the "if you run Windows, you're going to have to format yearly just to keep your computer at operating speed" isn't true entirely. The longer you run Windows the more the registry will grow as you add stuff to it, and that's just gotta slow Windows down at some point.
Yeah the tesco guy was definitely confusing notebooks with netbooks... I am positive that the shift to "notebook" was because "laptop" implies you can keep it in your lap, but they really get too hot for that, especially considering all the burn stories such as the one the tesco guy described.
As far as "without word processors" goes, maybe the rep meant they don't ship MS Office on their netbooks but many of their notebooks tend to come with it? I'm just trying to make his statement make SOME sense in his defense.
Umm video/audio files are compressed, so technically we have this already. What you are proposing is compression inside of compression, which is quite useless. If you actually are getting good compression ratios from the RAR or ZIP then the video wasn't encoded with a good compression algorithm to begin with.
They are already working with per-process tabs. AFAIK they have a working prototype, even. I think it's targeted for Firefox 4, which is the same release as their complete* UI overhaul (the screenshot in the article shows their current idea for Firefox 4).
* By "complete" I mean "completed", not "everything". Partial changes will come in 3.7 to give everyone a chance to get used to the changes instead of doing everything at once.
On second thought perhaps what they meant by Office Ribbon was simply the "Tabs on top" approach, which the Office Ribbon sort of resembles, and how that approach makes apparent that the address bar is tied to the active tab (since the tab pops out of it).
It's strictly "opt in" for web developers, so don't worry, for websites that don't explicitly request Google Chrome Frame, you'll keep the security you've come to expect from Microsoft!!!
(I know ANY website can request GCF to turn itself on but I just wanted to make that little joke.)
I was on a civil jury once (IE not a criminal case). We were allowed to write down questions for the judge about the case, and he would then distribute them to the appropriate lawyers who would answer them for us.
The trial I was juror for was a contract dispute, so we also had the full text of the contract and text of the laws that applied to the issue of disagreement while we deliberated.
There is an ad blocking extensions for Chrome but it runs in the background and is not configurable, and the occasional false positives break some sites. My preferred method of ad blocking until a proper solution comes out is a HOSTS list.
4% of 4GB for 2 hours is about 24kb/s (bytes, not bits). I have a non-business internet connection (meaning, there's a chance you don't get the full capacity you're paying for as with business accounts where the ISP is likely to be sued if they do that) in the US (as in that place that is lagging behind the rest of the world in broadband speeds) and my upload is 32kb/s (bytes again). Yeah, I think their internet is pretty slow.
If the school requires you to use proprietary Windows software and drivers (why using the standard protocols is out I'll never guess) and Wine doesn't work, you can set up a stripped-down Windows in a VM (MicroXP or TinyXP or an nLited-XP might work very well for this, but they have compatibility issues with some software so you might end up having a full-blown XP machine in a VM... test test and test to find an optimal setup) and then simply set up the VM to bridge your virtual machine network with the proprietary driver's network (or using Internet Connection Sharing is another option), then your VM will act as a router and your network should see all traffic coming from the authed VM and be happy.
Of course this isn't going to work with ALL crazy proprietary network stuff, it all depends on how they filter traffic/block leechers/whatever crazy reason they have.
I should probably add that I don't use Linux myself on a regular basis and had to do no crazy stuff at my college. However I've used Windows VMs to do stuff like try out iTunes without it leaving a trail on my host OS, and I am happy with it as a solution for trying out untrusted software or software that I don't want to have the run of my real PC.
I find using NoScript to keep Flash off until I want it on is quite acceptable. It may still be a risk if you frequent sites that allow users to upload their own flash content, but as long as you only visit such sites that screen and approve such content before making it public you should still be OK.
I'm all for invalidating software patents, but this one seems logical to me. The Google home page is iconic... the layout makes me think "Google". And at least this is a patent for something that will actually be used for not-litigation.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know it kinda fits if you consider TPB the guy on SKIs and whoever is trying to shut them down the guys on snow shoes.
Oh yeah addendum... because of different economies in different countries, companies will price games differently, IE based on how much that market is willing to spend on a game. If you could just import games from the cheapest place in the world you could be cheating people who worked hard on a game. If they end up not turning a profit on the game because of people who pirate or import they may not make a sequel. So support your favorite game developers! If you really don't think it's worth the price wait for it to go in the bargain bin.
Of course games that aren't even RELEASED in your region are a different matter.
PAL TVs use different aspect ratios and refresh rates from NTSC TVs. Games wouldn't play correctly (too slow or too fast, or glitchy/tearing graphics caused by incorrect refresh rates, and stretched or cropped graphics). Of course it's entirely possible for a game to be coded in such a way that it can correctly handle different refresh rates and aspect ratios, but I think older consoles were specifically limited to either NTSC or PAL modes in the hardware depending on region and you needed the appropriate mode games.
I am not an expert on this, but I'm willing to bet at least in the beginning that region unlocked TV-based games would have graphical problems when played on a "wrong region" TV.
I like how the Batman article complains about AA being force off, but then says "oh wait, it's not the same AA as what you can force on in driver settings, it's totally different". Sounds to me like it's not AA but something different, since it's done by the game engine instead of by DirectX. It's entirely possible the devs encountered problems using this AA engine on ATI hardware and so disabled it in order to ship in time.
Try setting the priority of MsMpEng to BelowNormal or Idle, this should keep it from eating all your CPU time.
You can also try disabling real time protection temporarily if something is going too slow thanks to the slower disk access and CPU.
I seem to recall having some framerate slowdown in online games while playing with the beta. I will have to try this new version though because of all the good reports. It shouldn't be too bad if I disable real time protection while I'm in-game... I'll do my own benchmarks to be sure.
And where do you get signature updates from nowadays? :)
Java didn't try to install anything last time I updated it.
It has an ad for OpenOffice.org in the installer (which utilizes Java for some bits and pieces) but that's it.
I usually have to format either when a) I do something stupid and make my system unbootable or unusable, such as installing IE8 and then accidentally running a third-party tool which replaces some of those files with backups of IE7 files, totally screwing up IE and any program that has a dependency on it (Steam or any program that uses the ActiveX control, IIRC).
Or b) something happens that I just can't fix. For example, every so often when I drag and drop files in Explorer, explorer will freeze instead of performing the drop operation. I have no explanation. Disabling copy hooks and drag and drop shell extensions has not fixed the problem. If it becomes annoying enough I will reinstall.
Incidentally tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of the last time I installed XP. Usually it's more like 6 months.
Oh yeah and I wouldn't exactly say the "if you run Windows, you're going to have to format yearly just to keep your computer at operating speed" isn't true entirely. The longer you run Windows the more the registry will grow as you add stuff to it, and that's just gotta slow Windows down at some point.
Yeah the tesco guy was definitely confusing notebooks with netbooks... I am positive that the shift to "notebook" was because "laptop" implies you can keep it in your lap, but they really get too hot for that, especially considering all the burn stories such as the one the tesco guy described.
As far as "without word processors" goes, maybe the rep meant they don't ship MS Office on their netbooks but many of their notebooks tend to come with it? I'm just trying to make his statement make SOME sense in his defense.
Well unless you don't compress the file in the ZIP (STORE). Then you can just seek directly from the file's offset.
Folders/Directories are a much simpler container that is more widely supported.
Umm video/audio files are compressed, so technically we have this already. What you are proposing is compression inside of compression, which is quite useless. If you actually are getting good compression ratios from the RAR or ZIP then the video wasn't encoded with a good compression algorithm to begin with.
They are already working with per-process tabs. AFAIK they have a working prototype, even. I think it's targeted for Firefox 4, which is the same release as their complete* UI overhaul (the screenshot in the article shows their current idea for Firefox 4).
* By "complete" I mean "completed", not "everything". Partial changes will come in 3.7 to give everyone a chance to get used to the changes instead of doing everything at once.
On second thought perhaps what they meant by Office Ribbon was simply the "Tabs on top" approach, which the Office Ribbon sort of resembles, and how that approach makes apparent that the address bar is tied to the active tab (since the tab pops out of it).
It's strictly "opt in" for web developers, so don't worry, for websites that don't explicitly request Google Chrome Frame, you'll keep the security you've come to expect from Microsoft!!!
(I know ANY website can request GCF to turn itself on but I just wanted to make that little joke.)
I was on a civil jury once (IE not a criminal case). We were allowed to write down questions for the judge about the case, and he would then distribute them to the appropriate lawyers who would answer them for us.
The trial I was juror for was a contract dispute, so we also had the full text of the contract and text of the laws that applied to the issue of disagreement while we deliberated.
There is an ad blocking extensions for Chrome but it runs in the background and is not configurable, and the occasional false positives break some sites. My preferred method of ad blocking until a proper solution comes out is a HOSTS list.
4% of 4GB for 2 hours is about 24kb/s (bytes, not bits). I have a non-business internet connection (meaning, there's a chance you don't get the full capacity you're paying for as with business accounts where the ISP is likely to be sued if they do that) in the US (as in that place that is lagging behind the rest of the world in broadband speeds) and my upload is 32kb/s (bytes again). Yeah, I think their internet is pretty slow.
If the school requires you to use proprietary Windows software and drivers (why using the standard protocols is out I'll never guess) and Wine doesn't work, you can set up a stripped-down Windows in a VM (MicroXP or TinyXP or an nLited-XP might work very well for this, but they have compatibility issues with some software so you might end up having a full-blown XP machine in a VM... test test and test to find an optimal setup) and then simply set up the VM to bridge your virtual machine network with the proprietary driver's network (or using Internet Connection Sharing is another option), then your VM will act as a router and your network should see all traffic coming from the authed VM and be happy.
Of course this isn't going to work with ALL crazy proprietary network stuff, it all depends on how they filter traffic/block leechers/whatever crazy reason they have.
I should probably add that I don't use Linux myself on a regular basis and had to do no crazy stuff at my college. However I've used Windows VMs to do stuff like try out iTunes without it leaving a trail on my host OS, and I am happy with it as a solution for trying out untrusted software or software that I don't want to have the run of my real PC.
I have a friend who shared his Steam account like this, I think two accounts filled with games were stolen by "friends of friends".
As someone who uses Windows who sees exactly the same poor performance in Flash, I KNOW who's at fault.
I find using NoScript to keep Flash off until I want it on is quite acceptable. It may still be a risk if you frequent sites that allow users to upload their own flash content, but as long as you only visit such sites that screen and approve such content before making it public you should still be OK.
Sounds like it doesn't from your post-parent. Mind giving some reasons why it "sucks"?
I'm all for invalidating software patents, but this one seems logical to me. The Google home page is iconic... the layout makes me think "Google". And at least this is a patent for something that will actually be used for not-litigation.
C'mon, some of us can't use Linux and are forced to use Windows here. Give US a link too!